


Where you are, I will be

by WinterRose527



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, F/M, Modern AU, Plague, Soft Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2019-09-30 03:44:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17216384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterRose527/pseuds/WinterRose527
Summary: The Valyrian Flu, commonly referred to as the Dragon’s Curse for the feeling of burning from within that was the final stage before death, swept through the world at an alarming rate. Within the first two days it was suggested, back when things like this were still conjectured about on the morning news, that a tenth of the population had perished. A week later, when half of it was gone, there was no one left to report on such a thing.





	1. Prologue

In the latter part of the last century, scientists discovered that the Bubonic Plague, commonly referred to as the _Black Death_ , could be cured by antibiotics. This made those practicing modern medicine feel a certain superiority over the millions who died in misery centuries prior, and more dangerous still, gave them the assurance that they would never in their lifetime see such an epidemic.

 

If anyone had listened more fully to a wise man’s theory of evolution, they would have perhaps not felt quite so certain. For they would have realised that all of evolution is a matter of survival, and therefore as the prey adapts so must the predator.

 

The Valyrian Flu, commonly referred to as the _Dragon’s Curse_ for the feeling of burning from within that was the final stage before death, swept through the world at an alarming rate. Within the first two days it was suggested, back when things like this were still conjectured about on the morning news, that a tenth of the population had perished. A week later, when half of it was gone, there was no one left to report on such a thing.

 

The people of the modern world found themselves suddenly in similar circumstances to those who fought against the Black Death. There were no cell phones, no internet, electricity and clean water were soon in short supply. Like their counterparts centuries before some turned towards prayer, others to farfetched ideas of how to ward off the illness, while some merely relished in the lawlessness that always accompanied times of chaos.

 

Others still embarked on journeys to reunite with loved ones so that they might survive and rebuild, or failing that, perish together.

 

It was often thought in the years following an occurrence of the Black Death that the souls of the recently departed remained on the same plane as the living, as though there were simply too many for heaven and hell to split between them and so some were ultimately doomed to a second life on earth forever waiting for absolution or damnation.

 

There was no way of proving such a thing, of course, but it is worth mentioning now so that you know. So that I’ve prepared you. Just because I am the one telling this story does not mean that I’ve survived, but if you are reading this it means that someone did, and that, dear reader, is hope enough.

 

 

 


	2. The Outbreak

Robb woke with a sudden chill.

 

That was rare, he was not often cold, and never in the Riverlands where he attended university. He was northern stock, in spite of his Tully features, and true northerners never got cold.

 

He rolled over and flinched when his arm fell upon something as hard as porcelain and as cool as steel.

 

“Marg?,” he asked the girl lying beside him.

 

Her mouth was open but there was no answer, her eyes wide but unseeing.

 

Robb stumbled back out of bed, falling against the wall of his bedroom. He looked down at his hands as though to check for blood but they were clean because he was innocent.

 

By the end of the day the first stain would be upon them.

 

He moved back towards the bed, pressing his fingers where her pulse was meant to be. Her pulse had always been strong, he could feel it against his lips when he kissed her neck, the wild thrumming of it. Margery Tyrell had been vitality itself.

 

It was readily apparent that all mentions of Margery now would be spoken using the past tense, for she was undeniably dead. Nineteen years old and she’d died right next to him and he hadn’t even known it.

 

The boy wondered if she had tried to wake him, she had always told him that he slept like the - well, anyway, even if she had tried to wake him he would have been no use to her. He could have done nothing more than hold her hand as she died, and while they’d never really fallen into love, he would have done so if he’d only known. 

 

It was a habit of Robb Stark’s, at the time, to always do the right thing. The eldest of five children, he had been raised in his father’s image. He always chose the right side of an argument, always defended those who could not defend themselves.

 

But that was when things were black and white. That was before. Afterwards, it became harder to tell what was right and what was wrong.

 

He backed away from the bed and picked up his phone. He had three missed calls from his father and six from his mother. He dialled his father back, because in spite of the fact that he was closer to his mother, his father’s counsel was the one he always sought.

 

“R—obb?,” his father’s voice cut through with static asked.

 

“Dad? I need your help,” he cried. He hadn’t realised he was crying until he heard his voice. “I… there’s a girl here. She’s dead.”

 

“GET AWAY FROM HER!,” his father shouted, the static gone, his voice crystal clear and more vehement than it had ever been.

 

“But Dad she’s - shouldn’t I call the police? Or a hospital?,” he asked.

 

“Don’t touch her, don’t move her,” Ned Stark ordered.

 

“I checked for her pulse,” Robb confessed.

 

“Okay, son, okay,” his father said in a comforting voice. It was the voice he used to use on his eldest daughter when he helped her rid whatever slop her younger sister had flung into her hair, the voice he used when Rickon, the baby of the family, skinned his knees. It had always calmed the Stark children. “You need to wash your hands in scalding water with good soap. And then you need to pack some things, keep it to a backpack if you can. Pack fresh pairs of underwear and socks. Your running shoes and your hiking boots if you have a pair there. You need something to cut the wind and something warm. Then you need to get the knife your Uncle Benjen got you for your 16th birthday. Load up your car with as many water bottles and as much food as you have and then get on the road. You need to get to Sansa and then come north.”

 

“Dad, I didn’t hurt her,” he shook his head.

 

“I know you didn’t, son,” his father said. “There’s something else going on. People are dropping like flies in the south. They go to bed with a sore throat in a fever and in the morning they’re dead. They’re… they’re cautioning everyone to quarantine themselves but… I don’t trust that they won’t take matters into their own hands to contain it. You need to get your sister north. Can you do that?”

 

It was too much information for anyone to receive, but Robb had been raised the son of a soldier. He knew how to follow orders.

 

Before too long he would learn how to give them.

 

“Yes sir,” he said, the girl in his bed nearly forgotten when he thought of a different beautiful girl with auburn hair and music in her laughter. “I’ll get Sansa.”

 

“I’m sorry, son,” his father sighed, “To put this on you. I’d come down and get you both myself but -“

 

“This makes more sense,” Robb agreed, “We’ll all be together by the end of the week.”

 

There was no way he could know that this would be the last time they would ever speak.

 

*

 

Robb’s younger sister, the eldest Stark girl, Sansa, sat on the bed of her dorm room with her brow furrowed and the tip of her tongue sticking out in between her light pink lips.

 

She was very carefully applying pale pink nail polish to the middle toe on her right foot. In those days, _before_ , she did everything carefully. She had long been considered a perfectionist by her siblings, who liked to tease her good-naturedly for this supposed flaw in her character.

 

These siblings of hers would not recognise her months from now with her hair haphazardly pulled away from her face and tears in the knees of her jeans, though these would be the least drastic changes about her.

 

She swept the brush up her small nail before repeating the gesture right next to her first swipe. She took her already painted pinky nail and scraped away some excess polish and nearly dropped the brush when her phone started buzzing. She smiled when she saw the name on the caller ID.

 

“Hi Robby,” she cooed at him.

 

“Sansa?,” his voice had never sounded quite so manic. Not even the one time he had tried cocaine with Theon. “Are you sick? How are you feeling?”

 

“I feel fine, what’s wrong?,” she asked.

 

“Haven’t you spoken to Mom or Dad?,” he asked, “Or seen the news? Or twitter or anything?”

 

“No,” she shook her head, “Nobody called me except you.”

 

“The phone lines must be jammed already, so I don’t want to waste any time. There is some sort of… _epidemic_ or something. People are getting sick, and dying. Really quickly. Nobody knows how it is spreading or how to stop it or anything. I’m coming to get you, I need you to get yourself ready to go. Pack only practical things. Sneakers and a warm jacket, extra socks. We have to be prepared in case we have to ditch the car.”

 

“Ditch the car? Robb, I don’t understand,” Sansa shook her head.

 

Though they had been raised by the same father, one might not know it if they saw the man interact with his two eldest children. Ned Stark had wanted to prepare Robb for the world, and protect Sansa from it.

 

“It’s bad Sansa,” Robb told her, “It’s really bad. People are… looting, rioting. The highways are already a mess. I’m going to get to you and I’m going to keep you safe but I need you to be prepared. Okay?”

 

Sansa nodded to herself, though her older brother couldn’t see her. He was telling her a lot of things but the one that she held onto was _I’m going to get to you and I’m going to keep you safe_. Nothing else made sense, but that did. That was something to hold onto, something she could trust.

 

“Okay, Robby,” she said.

 

“Now you need to stay away from people as much as possible, do you have food in your dorm room?,” he asked.

 

“A bit,” she said, getting off of her bed and checking her mini fridge. There were a few lemon yogurts and she had bread and peanut butter. There were a couple of water bottles cooling in the fridge as well. “Enough to last me until you get here anyway.”

 

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to get on the road in twenty minutes. Keep your phone plugged in and on high volume, it’ll need to be fully charged, and start packing. I’ll be there tomorrow and we’ll need to leave right away.”

 

She heard people running in the hallways outside and she stepped towards her door and opened it a crack. It was like something out of a movie, people running about, crying, shoving.

 

“What is that?,” he asked her.

 

“My dorm, Robb it’s crazy here,” she confessed.

 

“Close the door, Sansa! Close it and lock it. Barricade yourself if you need to. I don’t want you in contact with anyone if you can help it,” he urged her.

 

Robb was the soldier’s son but Sansa had always followed her older brother’s lead. He always knew the right thing to do, and she trusted that he’d keep her safe.

 

She closed the door and locked it and before she could think of how silly it seemed to do so she pulled her bookshelf across the floor and leaned it in against the door and her desk.

 

“Okay, Sansa I’ve got to go, I’ll try to call you from the road when I’m closer,” he told her.

 

“Wait!,” she stopped him.

 

“What is it?,” he asked with a tone of exasperation in his voice.

 

“You need to get her, Robb,” she ordered.

 

“Get wh-No.”

 

“Robb, if what you say is true then this is bigger than anything that has happened in the past. She’s my best friend.”

 

“She’s also a fucking _princess_ practically. Don’t you think her family will be sending a private plane to whisk her off to some private island?,” he asked.

 

The boy said it in anger and sarcasm but there was enough possibility in it that his sister paused. She paused long enough to consider that maybe that was the plan, that maybe Myrcella Baratheon was already a mile in the sky, looking down at the expanses containing the wretched unfortunates as she sipped a freshly made vanilla latte.

 

“Please just check, Robby,” she begged him, “For me. Please, you might be her only hope.”

 

That morning, Sansa Stark saved two lives. And took many more.

 

***

 

“No, Arys,” Myrcella Baratheon said through the speakerphone. “Don’t come.”

 

“Miss Myrcella I really think I ought -,” he started.

 

He was interrupted, they both were by a bang on her door. Myrcella went into the bag she had been packing and pulled out a small velvet sheath.

 

As though she had practiced this many times before she removed the blade from its covering. It seemed to glimmer in the grey sunlight and it caught the reflection of a remarkably pretty girl, making it glimmer even further.

 

“Who’s there?,” she asked in a voice far deeper than her normal cadence.

 

“Robb…Stark,” the voice said in a tone that made it clear he was just as surprised to find himself there.

 

“Miss Myrcella your mother wouldn’t -,” Arys started.

 

“And what does all that matter now?,” she asked him. A single tear fell down her cheek, “Take heart, old friend. I’ll see you again, I know it.”

 

“Myrcella?,” Robb asked.

 

She did not wait for Arys’ parting words before she hung up the phone. She wiped her cheek on her way to the door. It was a habit of hers even then not to hold onto things once they were no longer of use.

 

She moved the bookcase away from her door and undid the chain. She turned the lock and opened the door, knife poised in front of her. Her hand was steady despite the frantic beat of her heart.

 

“I- WOAH, what the fuck?,” Robb asked.

 

“It’s madness out there,” she reasoned, “I barricaded myself in.”

 

Only moments before Robb had cautioned his sister to do just the same, but even still it beguiled him that she had done so. Then again, everything about Myrcella Baratheon beguiled Robb Stark.

 

The pair of them stood staring at one another until Myrcella stepped aside and Robb took it as the invitation it was. When he was safely in her room she closed it and did the latch once again. One boy had already tried to break in earlier that morning, looking for valuables and perhaps something else.

 

“What are you doing here?,” she wondered.

 

Despite attending the same school, the pair had not spoken in three years. Not since the morning of his seventeenth birthday.

 

“Sansa,” he said. The girl’s eyes watered immediately and she backed away from him as though he might strike her. His blue eyes widened as he seemed to understand what she suspected, “No, no El-Myrcella she’s fine. She’s not sick, yet anyway. I’m going to go get her and take her north. She asked me to find you.”

 

The girl dug her palms into her eyes, preferring the harsh pressure against them to the sight of this boy watching her cry.

 

Generosity was one of Sansa’s most prominent characteristics, one of the ones that would remain _after_ , so Myrcella did not ask Robb why he had come. It was entirely believable to her that Sansa, alone in the Vale would postpone her safety to ensure Myrcella’s own.

 

“You’re going to get her?,” she asked Robb. He nodded and she re-sheathed the blade. “Good. Keep her safe.”

 

The boy looked at her his jaw clenched and nodded, “I will. Is your family arranging a way out for you?”

 

There was nothing about this girl that he would fail to notice, so he saw the way her breath quickened ever so slightly and the way she shook her head, though it would have been imperceptible to anyone else.

 

“There is nothing they can do,” she told him truthfully, “But I’ll find my way.”

 

“On your own?,” he asked and to her it seemed as though he did not try to keep the incredulity from his tone.

 

“I can take care of myself,” she told him.

 

The girl’s family was infamous for their pride, but it was not this familial trait that caused her to say so. She had been taking care of herself for many years already and she would soon prove the truth of her words.

 

Though neither would have admitted it in that moment, Robb knew her better than most. Even he, though, did not see her for who she truly was then. Perhaps that is why he did it. Or perhaps the reason he did what he did had absolutely nothing to do with the girl’s abilities.

 

“No, you’re coming with me,” he told her.

 

“Why would you do that?,” she wondered.

 

“Sansa,” he said again simply. It was only half a lie, and it could be imagined that he did not realise it was one at all. “Can you be ready to leave in ten minutes? I want to get on the road.”

 

Myrcella looked around the small dorm room that had been her home for the past six months. There was only so much she could take that she had not packed already, so she went to her closet and pulled on a pair of hiking boots, and grabbed her running shoes and put them in her large backpack.

 

She pulled on her windbreaker, the lining of which was already in the backpack and then went to her chest of drawers. She opened it up and pulled out a jewelry box.

 

The box had once belonged to her maternal grandmother, and she traced her finger over the intertwined _JL_ on the cover. She opened it then and pulled out the individual velvet bags and dumped them into her backpack.

 

“Is that seriously what you’re bringing?,” Robb questioned. “The world is ending out there and you’re making sure you have the right _jewels_ for it?”

 

The disdain in his voice might have broken a weaker girl, but in the midst of everything Myrcella found it almost reassuring. As everything was changing at least his hatred for her remained. There was comfort in that familiarity.

 

“It’s madness out there,” she said once again, dropping the box without a second glance and zipping up the backpack. She yanked her cell phone charger out of the wall and stuffed it in one of the front pockets. She went into her mini fridge and grabbed out all the bottles of water she had and handed them to him, as she grabbed the small bag of apples and the few yogurts. “If this persists my credit card isn’t going to mean a damn thing. You might be grateful for these jewels when that time comes.”

 

He looked at her like he might argue. In truth, he considered it, but he kept his mouth shut.

 

It was the wiser choice, for the ruby on the ring finger of her right hand would one day be traded for the penicillin used to save his life.

 

***

 

There were some, in the early hours, who still tried to maintain order and peace. Those things that would soon become relics alongside iPhones and binge watching.

 

Jon Snow was one such person. And he would fight for them longer than most, though not in the way that he would have ever imagined.

 

“They did this!,” he growled, “Our own brothers.”

 

They were in the stores of the police department. The clerk who handled supply distribution lay dead on the floor, his skull cracked open.

 

He and Edd walked through, looking at the empty walls where all manners of guns once hung. He went into the back and pulled out a bullet proof vest and pulled it on, then went into the back stores that only he and Mormont - before he’d died defending the clerk - had the keys to.

 

Jon had been out on patrol when it all started. He’d come back for reinforcements only to find the police on the brink of civil war. The sight of Mormont dead had caused the animal within this young man to rise to the surface, and three of the men he had only yesterday called brother lay dead as well.

He opened the heavy door and went in and grabbed out boxes of bullets, another pistol and a heavy black jacket. He pulled off his Trident Police Department jacket and pulled this other one, used for undercover missions, on.

 

“You’re going back out there?,” Edd asked him, “It’s _chaos_ out there, you’ll have no chance of restoring order.”

 

“I’m not going to restore order,” Jon told him gruffly.

 

“You took a vow,” Edd reminded him.

 

Their’s was an elite force of the Police Department called the Night’s Watch. It functioned separately from the rest and had a different code. That code had been broken many times that morning already.

 

“Aye, I did,” Jon agreed, “But as you say I have no chance of restoring order. So isn’t it better if I focus on something I _can_ do?”

 

“What’s that?,” Edd asked as he pulled on another vest.

 

An image of long auburn hair flashed in Jon Snow’s eyes. He took his phone out and dialled.

 

“Jon?,” the familiar voice of Robb Stark came through the line. It sounded static-y and far off but it was him, clear as day. He was alive. The man who might as well have been his true brother was alive. “You beautiful fucking bastard, I knew you’d be alive.”

 

“And I you,” Jon agreed, smiling in spite of both his nature and the situation. “You Starks are hard to kill, eh?”

 

Robb chuckled, as though they were simply at the lake having a few beers. As though the world wasn’t ending all around them. As though his statement were true.

 

Neither of them would have said so at the time, but the knowledge that the other was alive gave them each the hope necessary to become the men they soon would be.

 

“I hope so,” Robb said, “Where are you? We’re heading to Sansa and then we’re going north. Come with us. We can come back for you.”

 

Robb attended school only thirty miles north of the city where Jon was stationed. On a normal day, he could have been to him in under an hour.

 

“No,” Jon shook his head. “It’s… Robb do _not_ come here.”

 

“Meet us there, then,” Robb urged him. “We’ll travel north together.”

 

Jon knit his brow together, wondering at the plurality of Robb’s suggestion.

 

“Who’s us?,” he asked.

 

There was silence for a moment, and though Jon could not see it, Robb was glancing warily over at the girl who sat in the passenger seat of his Land Rover, looking out the window. She was angry at him for suggesting that they’d go back. They had already been on the road for an hour and had hardly made it ten miles. The streets were littered with bodies already, store windows had been smashed, there was a lawlessness to the land that only the day before would have seemed impossible.

 

“Me and…Myrcella… Baratheon,” Robb said.

 

Though neither of them had ever known any other Myrcella, such was the impact she had made in Robb’s life that he uttered both of her names, like a prayer and a curse.

 

Jon grimaced, “That’s gotta be awkward.”

 

In spite of his discomfort for his friend, Jon was relieved. He did not know Myrcella as well as either Stark sibling but he was fond of her. In spite of everything that had happened those years ago, he knew she was a good person. And he knew what she was to Robb. His brother never would have forgiven himself if he’d left her.

 

“You’re on speakerphone,” her aristocratic voice cut in, “And yes… it is awkward.”

 

Jon bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. The obvious disdain in her voice was oddly reassuring.

 

“Can you meet us there by tomorrow?,” Robb asked. “I don’t know if we’ll even make it there by then, it’s absolute madness out here, man, I’ve got to get to Sansa.”

 

Sansa Stark. Her name might as well have been a battle cry to Jon Snow.

 

“I’ll get there,” he promised. “We’ll keep her safe, together.”

 

“ _ROBB LOOK OUT!,”_ Myrcella cried.

 

“ _Oh fuck, hold tight Ella,”_ Robb growled.

 

Jon heard shouting and banging. It sounded like people were trying to smash their car windows and Jon’s stomach clenched, his body braced for action as though he wasn’t uselessly miles away.

 

He would have thrown his body in front of either of them. That was who he’d always been. He did not realise then the importance of his own survival.

 

“ _Are you okay?_ ,” Robb asked, his voice shaking.

 

“ _I’m okay,”_ Myrcella assured him, her voice steady. “ _That was a hell of a move, Stark.”_

 

“Jon if you somehow make it there before us, head north. Only north. Don’t wait,” Robb ordered, a new urgency in his tone.

 

What none of them knew was that Robb Stark had just killed his first man.

 

“Same to you, brother,” Jon nodded, “I can take care of myself. Get her safe and I’ll find you. I promise you that. I’ll leave within the hour.”

 

“Farewell Snow,” Robb said.

 

“And you Stark,” Jon returned.

 

When the line went dead Jon shoved his phone back into his pocket.

 

“You’re leaving?,” Edd asked him, blocking the doorway. “You swore a vow!”

 

“Either put a bullet between my eyes or get out of my way,” Jon growled. “There’s nothing here for us now. This isn’t going to get better, there’s no cure. This is only the beginning. I can’t… I can’t help these people. But there’s a girl out there, all alone. I can help her.”

 

The girl in question had already packed and repacked her large backpack three times already. She had already heard the screams of the dying. She had already hid in terror as someone tried to break into her room, grateful that she had taken her older brother’s advice. She had already broken down in sobs when she learned that her baby brother had succumbed to the fever.

 

By the time he got to her, the Sansa Stark Jon had always known would be dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love to hear what you all think! xox


	3. The Unspoken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey ya'll, just as a heads up this chapter is ONLY Robb and Myrcella. Next chapter will be only Jon and Sansa.

The pair drove mostly in silence.

 

While in the first hours they had both eaten an apple and drank a full bottle of water, neither touched food or drink once the sky turned dark. They were both slender, active people, so it could be argued that sitting for long hours meant they had no appetite. There had been more bodies lying dead on the road as well, the sight of which could turn any stomach. And anxiety would have been well understandable in such a time. But none of these were the true cause of their abstention.

 

Neither voiced it to the other, for they were only speaking when absolutely necessary, but it occurred to them both, individually yet simultaneously, that what was happening was beyond what anyone could imagine. That things were worse than they were even saying on the radio. That they should conserve every bit that they had because there was no saying how long food and water would be readily available and the drive north, at this rate, could take weeks.

 

The pair often had similar thoughts, the same voice spoke in both of their heads, pointing them in the right direction. It was perhaps, what had first drawn them to one another. And ultimately, what drove them apart.

 

“Do you want me to drive?,” Myrcella asked.

 

“I’m good,” Robb lied. He glanced down and noted in a clipped tone, “We’ll need gas soon though.”

 

She picked up her phone from where it was charging and pulled up the app that told her what was around the area. It is a wonder, that things like that used to exist, is it not?

 

“There’s one a few miles up, exit 20,” she told him.

 

He nodded and switched into the right lane. Traffic had thinned in the last hour. Both of them knew but tried to ignore what that meant.

 

“When we get there, I want you to stay in the car,” he told her.

 

The girl opened her mouth to protest, but she did not have the desire to argue.The radio had been warning of looting and rioting and they had seen it already. Windshields smashed, pick-up trucks filled with televisions, the men who had tried to get into their car as they waded through the traffic.

 

She wasn’t afraid, though perhaps she ought to have been, she simply did not want to hear what he would say if she argued. That he did not want to have to worry about protecting her. This would lead her to question why he cared what happened to her anyway. Before long they would have been arguing.

 

Sometimes when there are too many things that need to be said between people, silence feels preferable.

 

Robb pulled the car off the highway and they saw the gas station immediately. The outside lights were on but the indoor lights were not.

 

“That’s too bad,” Myrcella said. “We could have filled up a few cans.”

 

He had been thinking the same thing. In truth, he would have liked to get some coffee or failing that an energy drink. He had no intention of stopping to sleep. There had been words that the men who tried to get in the car were shouting at the girl beside him. Horrible things that made him think of an innocent auburn haired girl all alone in the Vale.

 

“We’ll have to make do,” he shrugged as though it was no matter.

 

When they pulled in it became obvious that though the store was not open the door was.

 

“We can get in,” she told him. “We-“

 

“I’ll go, I told you I want you to stay here.”

 

She kept her eyes straight ahead and suggested, “If they have any medical supplies you might want to grab them.”

 

He wanted to tell her that they would not need them, that they would be safe in his home of Winterfell before anything like that would be necessary, but he couldn’t.

 

“Lock the doors behind me,” he said instead.

 

He leaned over the centre console and opened his glove compartment and took out the knife his Uncle Benjen had given him when he turned sixteen. As he pulled away his eyes met hers, blue on green, closer to one another than they had been in three years.

 

“Do -“

 

“Stay in the car.”

 

He got out and waited until he heard the doors lock behind him. There were cars abandoned on the side of the road but no cars at the gas station itself. He filled the gas tank first. Just in case. He’d left the keys in the car for the same reason.

 

He ran into the store, gripping the knife tightly. The words those men had shouted at Myrcella were repeating themselves over and over again in his head.

 

Shelves were turned over, the cigarettes and electronics were gone. He ignored that and went to the refrigerator and pulled out more bottles of water and a couple of energy drinks. He pulled one of the shelves off of the other and grabbed nuts and more granola bars, all of them going in the little basket he’d grabbed when he walked in.

 

He went to the little shelf that held medical supplies. Pain relievers, cold medicine, aids for indigestion. He grabbed bandages and gauze and rubbing alcohol. He grabbed a bottle of pain relievers just in case as well. He grabbed toothpaste and four toothbrushes and baby wipes.

 

It felt like defeat.

 

He glanced around once more, though he really didn’t want to steal anything more. Not with the amount of gasoline they would be taking.

 

His gaze fell to the candy shelf, and more specifically to a little packet of Sour Patch Kids. Just like that he smelled buttered popcorn and heard a melodic giggle. It would have been easy to grab them, but he didn’t. Instead he moved towards the door to pick up the empty canisters.

 

“You know, boy, it’s a sin to steal,” a slow, mean drawl cut in.

 

Robb turned around, knife braced in front of him.

 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he growled at the man, forcing his eyes not to widen when he realised it was two.

 

They looked amongst themselves and chuckled lightly, as though they had played this game before though the plague was only hours old. There were some in the world who had shown their propensity for evil even before circumstance made it acceptable, or at the very least common place.

 

“Leave the goods and your car and we’ll let you live,” one offered.

 

“And the girl too,” the other suggested with a chuckle, “I like the look of ‘er.”

 

Robb would blame the surge in his stomach on the adrenaline.

 

“There’s no girl,” the first one said.

 

“What’re you blind Walder, she’s sittin’ pretty right in the front seat,” the other scoffed.

 

“If you let me by I’ll let _you_ live,” Robb offered them.

 

Courage is not something that is learned, it is something innate. Something that one either has or doesn’t. It is activated, not grown. He had never been in a situation such as this, but it did not matter.

 

The pair chuckled and the words were playing in his head over and over as he advanced. The first stopped laughing and charged towards him, proffering his own blade. There was a tumble, it was all elbows and knees, as though they had forgotten that steel was at their disposal as well. The other man remembered first and went to stab Robb in the abdomen, but he keened back and this time when he thrust it was blade first. Blood sputtered out of the man’s mouth, a look of surprise in his nearly black eyes.

 

He was not the first man Robb had killed, but Robb did not know that. Even ifhe did deep down, the other man on the road had been left behind so quickly. He had not seen the light drain from him, had not seen the sputtering for breath, or the way tears traveled down his cheeks. He pulled the knife out of the man and backed away just in time to see the pistol aimed at his face.

 

He did not have time to think or hope or pray. All roads would have lead to the same castle if he had, so perhaps it wasn’t necessary.

 

Though reason told him it was impossible, he would have sworn that the man’s eyes turned a violent shade of red. The tip of a Valyrian steel knife poked through his neck, as clean as if all the bone and skin and tissue were nothing more than butter.

 

The man crumbled to the ground and Myrcella knelt with him, placing her hand on his shoulder and retracting the blade. She wiped the blood off on the shoulder of his jacket.

 

“I told you to stay in the car,” he all but shouted at her.

 

His words were immediately followed by him crossing to her and taking the knife from her hand. He checked her hands first, which were steady, and then her face, turning her this way and that to make sure that no harm had come to her.

 

“I told you to stay in the car,” he repeated in a softer tone.

 

Her eyes met his, green on blue, closer still.

 

She did not ask the obvious question and he did not thank her.

 

Sometimes when there are too many things that need to be said between people, silence feels preferable.


	4. The Alone

“Mommy,” Sansa whimpered.

 

She hadn’t called her mother that since she was ten years old. She often called her Mom, or Catelyn if they had been arguing.

 

Finding out that her eight year old brother had died had reduced her to little more than a child herself.

 

“My baby,” her mother wailed.

 

It was not her first loss of the day. In the early hours and days, when the internet still worked and the impetus even in crisis was to share and put forth into the world, people were sending updates as to their survival. Some were live streaming the traffic, others were sending pictures of them hunkered down, some were focused on finding the perfect meme to sum up their experience. Most though, were simply sending hourly check-ins.

 

_I’m alive._

 

_I’m alive._

 

_I’m alive._

 

Jeyne had stopped updating a couple of hours ago. Theon too.

 

She loved them, she missed them, but Rickon was her baby brother. This was a wound that would not easily be healed. This was a damnation for which there could be no absolution.

 

“Was he in pain?,” she asked. A mean silence met her. “Is anyone else sick?” This time silence would not suffice. “Mom?”

 

“I think you and Robb need to think of another plan. Coming here might not be an option.”

 

Chills, it was soon determined, were the first symptom of the Valyrian Flu. In the early days a sudden gust of wind could throw an entire family into a panic for the rush of cold it sent down their spines. Goosebumps were met with terror, a shiver was enough to have someone quarantined without food or water or hope.

 

But even as a chill so fierce it caused her teeth to chatter swept through her body Sansa did not fear that she had the plague. In that moment she realised what Robb and Myrcella had realised only moments before, what Jon had realised that morning when he’d seen his commander’s bloody chest, that the world had now been split into two time periods. Before and after.

 

Before, if someone had asked any Stark sibling of hers or any prior generation where the safest place in the world was, they would have said without hesitation or irony, Winterfell. The Starks always endured, they were the blood of Winterfell, they were stronger within it’s walls, amongst one another.

 

The idea that she and Robb would have to go elsewhere to ensure their survival told her everything about what the new world would be. A world without Winterfell was a world without certainty.

 

“What about you?,” she asked.

 

“I won’t leave them,” her mother told her.

 

 _Not even for us?_ Sansa wondered but didn’t ask.

 

“I love you,” her mother promised.

 

“I love you,” Sansa promised back.

 

If you had asked Sansa in that moment she would have lied, but the truth was, she did know that this was the last conversation she would have with her mother.

 

She hung up and paced the room. The cries had died down as had the running through the halls. There was no way of knowing how many of her classmates lay dead in their own dorm rooms, but she knew that she sat in a graveyard.

 

She looked down at her phone and saw an update from Myrcella. She and Robb were okay, so hope was not lost.

 

_I’m alive._

 

_I’m alive._

 

_I’m alive._

 

***

 

The early days were filled with decisions between the short term and the long term. It occurred to Jon, at least, that planning for the future was useless if you could not survive the present, and so he took the motorcycle instead of the large truck.

 

Had he taken the large truck, he could have had the ability to bring more supplies. Not only food and water, but guns and ammunition. Bullet proof vests and helmets. Extra jackets and boots. Night sticks and tasers.

 

All of these things would have been very helpful in the days and weeks to come.

 

However, had he taken that large truck, he would have been at the mercy of traffic. All of the radio reports he’d heard spoke of pile ups, car windows smashed, cars on fire. He would have been forced to keep pace with the masses, and that had never been Jon’s way.

 

So instead he took a departmentally issued motorcycle. He wore a bulletproof vest and a helmet. He had another helmet in one of the storage compartments and he would be giving the vest away as soon as he reached his destination. He had a couple of bottles of water and a few granola bars. The rest of the storage was filled with ammo and he had a number of guns and knives strapped to him.

 

His motorcycle jacket was designed to protect from the wind and hide his identity, so it was that nobody who he drove by would think he was a police officer. Instead, he merely looked terrifying and that was more than alright with him.

 

Despite the fact that he was thirty miles south and had about an hour delay behind Robb and Myrcella, he had passed them by hour two. He did not know this, of course. He was taking a different route and was making a point of not looking around unless absolutely necessary. He did not want to be distracted. There was an innocent auburn haired girl in the Vale and each moment that he was not there was another moment that she was alone.

 

It should be stated now that he loved the girl. Or perhaps that was obvious already?

 

It was a love so constant and unyielding, like the weirwood that rested on her family’s property, that it was rarely worthy of conversation. It was a love that had grown in childhood, sprouting branches and leaves in his body, all the while burrowing deeper and deeper, the roots wrapping around his ribs and spine.

 

He had never told her, of course. That had never even seemed a possibility. Even still, when the reports of the outbreak came through his first thoughts had been of her. Her elder brother had followed soon after.

 

Some of the greatest love stories are not romances.

 

In spite of the fact that at this very moment Robb had a pistol aimed at his head and Sansa was surrounded by death, Jon did not feel fear. He was confident, quite confident, that if one of them had died that he would know it. That they were so a part of his genetic make-up at this point that he would feel it if one of them were to leave the world.

 

He did not believe in the gods, but this, his love for the Starks, and the unshakeable devotion they had to one another was the closest thing to a religion he could imagine.

 

He looked down and saw that he was in need of gas. He knew he would have to steal it and he knew that he would most likely run into other travellers, that they could be evil or brutal or merely desperate.

 

He remembered the smell of lemon cakes baking and the soft melody of her singing and the way her dark lashes framed her light blue eyes. He remembered the sweater she had knit him the winter his mother died and the way she always called him on his birthday. He thought of the way her father doted on her and how her little brother, Rickon, the baby of the family, would crawl into her lap and ask her to tell him stories.

 

He was quick on the draw and his aim was exacting, and he was confident that he could fight his way through just about any situation he found himself in. It didn’t matter though. Even if he had not been so confident in himself the roots would have tugged him forward all the same, like strings on a puppet.

 

He thought of the way she’d smile at him when he walked in the door and the feel of her hand on his shoulder when they danced at her parents’ anniversary party.

 

He sped onwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter wasn't action heavy, but with Sansa alone in her dorm room and Jon on the road minding his own business I wanted to make it more introspective. There will definitely be more action coming though!
> 
> I'd love to hear what you all think!


	5. The Driver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myrcella & Robb again - I'll start to incorporate all characters into each chapter soon, but for pacing this is working a bit better for the moment!

It wasn’t until the second day that he finally let her drive.

 

She had fallen asleep sometime in the night and woken up restless and irritated by his stubbornness. He had been past the point of exhaustion for the better part of two hours and yet had still protested as though the girl that had saved his life was incapable of driving on a highway.

 

In all of the apocalypse movies the pair had seen there was always mass migration. While there had been heavy traffic in the early hours it had not resumed and instead their pace was slow because of all the cars abandoned on the road. The last moving car Robb had seen had been a large black SUV and he had averted the eyes of the driver, pressing on the gas as he glanced at the sleeping girl beside him.

 

She had changed in these three years. Her face had lost some of the roundness it had once had - she had never been fat, her mother would never have allowed it and her natural predilection towards activity would never have sustained it, but she had simply lost some of the childishness in her features. She had turned into the exact beauty that all of her childhood prettiness had predicted, and was elegant and refined even slumped against the window.

 

Her hair was a thousand different shades of gold and luscious and full - in those days she benefitted from regular trips to the salon and designer shampoos. Her face was perfectly symmetrical with the exception of a small birthmark under her left eyebrow that always gave the impression she was winking at you. This was exacerbated by the cadence of her voice, which to most seemed to have the traces of a joke that they couldn’t quite remember but were certain had been amusing. Her body, as previously noted, was athletic but still soft and inviting, her eyes were jadeite, her lips bowed.

 

All of these things, which had once seemed to Robb like mere confirmations that she was meant to be his, now served as reminders of the stupidity of his youth. He had been a fool, he was sure, to love her the way he did. She was a Lannister, spoiled rotten, and only a fool would give away their heart to someone who didn’t know the value of it.

 

He had been young, of course. Not yet seventeen. He had been a strapping youth, and had the confidence of someone who had gone through growth spurts at a young age and had already grown into themselves while other boys were still out buying new trousers every six weeks.

 

To him, it was perfectly understandable, even _inevitable_ that he would fall in love with the young Baratheon beauty, his sister’s best friend, and that she in turn would fall in love with him.

 

In his defence, all events happening during that time had supported his belief.

 

There was the time he had rescued her when she was stuck in the rain, laughing in spite of the four hundred dollar shoes that had been ruined by the sudden showers. He had pulled over to the side of the road and wrapped his own jacket around her slender shoulders, helping her into the warm comfort of his truck. Her hair had been dripping and rain drops had still rested on her eyelashes, and though there was no need to do so they spoke in hushed whispers, which gave the impression they were sharing great secrets.

 

There had been their first kiss. It was after one of his football games at a party in the woods. They had decided, in a bout of teenage stupidity to play hide and seek - because there was nothing that could ever go wrong from teenagers running around in the woods at night after drinking - and though he had been supposed to be hiding he was more intent on finding her. When he finally did she stomped on his foot for nearly giving her away and then he pushed her gently back against the tree when he saw Theon seeking. The lines of his body had fallen against the lines of hers and the moonlight seemed to poke through the branches for the sole purpose of being reflected in her eyes.

 

At the time he had very much intended for it to be both of their last first kisses, and as her lips pressed against his, soft and inviting, it felt like it might be.

 

Two months later she held his birthday present in one hand and his heart in the other as she told him that they couldn’t be together. When he guessed it was her family’s doing she didn’t deny it, but when he told her he would speak with her mother she argued with a vehemence he’d never heard before. He found out later that they had threatened her trust fund if she remained with him.

 

So perhaps, he figured, she had known the value of his heart.

 

He should have slept while she drove. Him resting was the whole purpose of her driving after all. He found though that he couldn’t.

 

With her awake he would not dare look at her, even though it was wiser to do so from the passenger seat than while he was driving. Even still, he was incredibly aware of her. Sixteen hours in the car did nothing to temper the smell of her, which had always been a mixture of jasmine and rain water, and sitting so close, in the seat she’d only recently vacated, he felt it surrounding him in a way it had not for three long years.

 

She was a competent driver. He had taught her when she was fourteen. He, Jon and Theon had taken her and Sansa on the back roads of his family’s property and given them lessons. Sansa had hated it, she didn’t like the way she said he snapped at her - though he tried not to - or being responsible for so many precious lives. The girl beside him though (he found it hard to use her name, even in his mind, and the nickname he’d given her was far too intimate for how little they knew one another now) had loved it from the start. He watched as she switched lanes, avoiding a parked red sedan.

 

She moved to the lane reserved for cars going the other direction, which seemed to be clearer. He had done the same while he’d been driving. They’d need gas again soon and he hadn’t decided whether they should risk another gas station. Given the pace they were going he didn’t want to waste any of the canisters they had filled up unnecessarily but he didn’t want to have to use either knife again so soon either.

 

In truth he didn’t want her to have to.

 

She had said nothing of it and had operated with a detached efficiency. She was good at compartmentalising. He less so.

 

Of course, he didn’t know that she had not looked at the man purposefully, so that his visage would not appear in her dreams. He didn’t know that she would be haunted by him - by each of the men she’d soon kill - because she’d never tell him. She had killed that man for him, and she knew that he would feel guilty if he knew how much pain she felt at taking a life.

 

She was used to hiding things from him for his own good.

 

“You need to rest,” she told him. Her voice was hoarse from lack of use.

 

“I’m fine,” he lied.

 

She changed lanes once again and said nothing more. He knew that she disapproved. She was not trying to hide it.

 

It was another hour before she tried again.

 

“We still have another few hours to the Vale and we haven’t seen what the mountains are like. If those roads have half as many abandoned cars as the highway does it’ll take us a week to drive up them. Sleep.”

 

Jon was driving up those roads now, though they didn’t know it. The air got thinner the further he drove but he accelerated anyway. Now that he was so close it felt as though she was further away than ever. He’d had incidents on the road, a man had tried to steal his bike, another group of men had been threatening a woman and her child. It didn’t matter, he road on.

 

“A plane would have been quicker,” Robb offered.

 

“Much,” she agreed.

 

“And safer,” he went on.

 

She used to be able to read him without even trying. It was as though she had a direct line into his mind, because he never tried to hide anything from her. She had been the one with the secrets, not him.

 

The boy beside her though was a stranger.

 

“Depending on the pilot,” she suggested lightly.

 

She didn’t expect him to laugh, it wasn’t funny enough for that, but she had hoped it would at least diffuse some of the tension that seemed to be rolling off of him.

 

“And yet here you are.”

 

The girl’s stomach clenched and her knuckles grew white on the steering wheel, but it was dark and besides, he was not looking. She said nothing.

 

“I don’t understand,” he went on.

 

“Leave it alone,” she sighed, feigning exasperation.

 

“Leave it _alone_?,” he argued, “You just killed a man! You were already packing when I came to your room. You say your family wouldn’t help you, but I don’t understand. Why didn’t your grandfather send his plane? Why aren’t you somewhere safe in the Summer Isles right now instead of on a never ending road trip heading away from your family with a guy you haven’t spoken to in three years?”

 

“Seemed like a good opportunity to catch up,” she evaded, the birthmark winking in annoyance.

 

“Damn it, I want an answer!,” he growled at her.

 

“Why?,” she challenged, “So you can go on being mad at me? So you don’t have to _thank_ me for saving your life? Go ahead, Robb. You have my permission - I did it for me. I killed that man for me _not_ you.”

 

They both knew she was lying. They both tried to convince themselves that she was telling the truth.

 

“You’re telling me that the people who threatened your trust fund over a guy you were dating wouldn’t do everything in their power to get you out safely?,” he argued. She had known that he knew about that but they had never spoken about it. “You’re telling me that the Lannisters didn’t want to save their precious princess? You’re telling me that Cersei _fucking_ Lan-“

 

“IS DEAD!,” she shouted at him. Tears pricked her eyes for the first time since she’d heard. It hadn’t seemed quite real when she’d spoken with Arys. “She and her brothers and mine, my grandfather. They’re all _dead_ alright? So you WIN. You win, Robb, congratulations! The Lannisters are _dead_ so _no_ there was no plane coming to take their _precious princess_ away to the Summer Isles.”

 

The silence in the car was more deafening than the one before. It was more silent than it had been when he’d found out about Rickon and Arya. His mother had called him with news of the first and Sansa with news of the second. He already knew that they would not be going to Winterfell.

 

“El-“

 

“Don’t call me that,” she spat at him.

 

He gulped and nodded, resting his elbow against the panel and looking out the window. He felt the sudden urge to cry, though she hadn’t. She had said nothing, nothing about it. All he could think about was her hand on the centre console when Sansa called him about Arya. Her palm had been facing upward, and he had known she intended for him to take it if he needed to.

 

“Myrcella I’m sor-“

 

“Please stop talking. Just shut up and let me drive.”

 

“I really-“

 

“SHUT UP!”

 

Neither of them saw the man standing in the road until she was nearly on top of him. When she swerved to avoid him her right arm shot out to protect the boy beside her.

 

In spite of what he thought he knew, there was no one who valued his heart more than her.


	6. The Suspension

The hours seemed long to Sansa.

 

The others all had a mission, but she was the mission. She was the one they were all coming to save, the princess in the tower. She felt like a bird in a cage, though she stalked back and forth like a wolf behind bars.

 

In the days that followed she would call herself a fool. A foolish girl. She would scold herself for not taking advantage of the plumbing and the soft, warm duvet cover. She should have watched all of her favourite television shows one last time.

 

But it was impossible to focus for more than a few minutes, and she didn’t want to have the sound on, lest someone know that she was here, and she didn’t want to put her headphones on, lest she not hear that someone else was.

 

She checked her phone for the thousandth time. Bran was dead. Arya was sick. So said her father anyway. Her mother had died an hour before.

 

She pressed _Robb_ and waited as the phone rang and rang and rang.

 

“Sansa?,” Ella’s voice answered, “Robb’s asleep. Are you alright?”

 

“Yeah I just wanted to check in,” she sighed, “How’s the road?”

 

“Never ending,” Ella lamented, “The GPS says we are an hour away, which means it’ll probably take three.”

 

“ _El-mmm-What’s going on?”_

 

_“Nothing, go back to sleep.”_

 

_“It’s three o’clock! I thought you were going to wake me at 2.”_

 

Her brother’s annoyance was met only with silence. She couldn’t imagine what it was like being in that car, and though she wanted them to get to her as quickly as they could, she wasn’t necessarily eager to join them.

 

She had never taken sides after her best friend broke up with her brother. She knew that it was Ella who ended things, but she had seen the succession of girls that Robb brought home to family dinners afterwards, had seen the way Ella would look at him holding Roslin Frey’s books in the hall. She didn’t know what had happened exactly, neither of them would tell her - for no matter how much they hurt each other, they would never hurt her by making her choose between them.

 

“Sansa, we are hoping to be there in three hours,” Ella began, ignoring Robb completely, “Have you heard from -“

 

“SANSA?! SANSA STARK!?,” she heard a loud, booming voice shout from the hallway.

 

“Is that -?,” Robb started but Ella shushed him.

 

“What do I do?,” Sansa whispered.

 

“Wait,” they both said in unison.

 

“SANSA? DOVEY WHERE ARE YOU, IT’S ME SWEET GIRL, IT’S JON, SANSA?”

 

“It’s him!,” they both shouted at her.

 

Though she couldn’t see them, they were both smiling for the first time since the outbreak. They had been afraid, so afraid for her. Though they loved her, and trusted her with their lives, they did not trust her with her own.

 

Jon though, they trusted him almost more than themselves when it came to her. They were right to trust him. His love for her was sturdy and ancient, one could have built cities upon the intractable foundations it lay.

 

“JON!,” Sansa started shouting, leaving Ella and Robb on speaker phone.

 

She hadn’t realised how many things she’d barricaded herself in with until she went to remove them. It was understandable why her siblings, too many of them now dead, had always teased her for being a perfectionist.

 

“SANSA!”

 

“JON! JON I’M HERE!,” she called, tears springing freely from her eyes.

 

She had known he was coming. Robb and Ella had told her so, but even still it seemed impossible that he was here. She knew he was fearsome, though at that time she did not know quite the extent of it, but even still his voice did not seem wholly real.

 

“Sansa!?!,” he started banging on the door.

 

“Hold on,” she pleaded desperately as she moved the book case out of the way.

 

She swung the door open and there he was. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold and his nearly black charcoal eyes were wild and a single black curl fell out of the motorcycle helmet he still wore, as though he had simply let the bike fall and ran into her dorm. Which he had.

 

Where there had once been shouting, now there was only silence. Even the boy and girl in the car, still driving, remained on the line in a suspended silence, waiting.

 

And then Jon Snow, who had always been the brooding sort even before this, smiled at her. He just smiled at her, because he couldn’t believe that he had made it to her either.

 

At that time, it felt as though the worst was over. It had to be. They were together.

 

She let out a sound that had never before been made, and never would be again, and then she leapt into his arms.

 

He caught her to him, his feet steady despite the impact and they held onto one another. It didn’t matter that he still wore his helmet, she nuzzled against him all the same, and though she was heavier than she’d ever be again she felt weightless to him, even as she anchored him.

 

If you had asked her then, she might not have known it, but something changed in that moment. Though she loved the boy and the girl in the car with her whole heart, there would never again be a single person more important to her than the boy who held her in his arms.

 

Nothing changed for the boy, for there had never been anyone more important to him than her.

 

The pair in the car glanced at one another for a moment and then both set their focus straight ahead.

 

When he finally set her down, she looked up at his helmet and asked, “Where are you going?”

 

His eyes drank her in, the cerulean of her eyes and the strands of gold amongst auburn in her hair, “Where are _we_ going?”

 

At the moment, the destination did not matter to her. Only the _we_ was important.

 

“North,” her brother answered anyway. They both looked at the phone she held in her hand, “Only North.”


	7. The Great Goodbye

It was nighttime once again and for now the street lamps still worked.

 

The auburn haired boy had offered to turn the heat on in the car, but the golden haired girl had demurred, citing the need to conserve fuel, and so she sat in the front seat, her hands in the parka she had grabbed on a whim before she left her dorm room, watching her breath exit her mouth.

 

She had grown tired of watching the road, she did not want to see the cars stopped in the middle or at the sides, didn’t want to see the bodies where they had fallen from disease or gunfire.

 

She clenched her fists and wished she could turn on the radio, but there was no radio left to turn on.

 

She heard it, on repeat, like nails on a chalkboard. The sound of the knife cutting through the man’s skin and tissue and bone. The sound of him choking on his own blood.

 

She pushed the button down on her window and a gust of cold thin air came rushing in. The sound of the wind whipping was terrible and it cleansed her mind.

 

She leaned her head back against her seat, relishing in it.

 

“Myrcella! You’ll freeze!,” Robb shouted at her.

 

She glanced to her side and from a passing streetlamp saw the fear in his eyes. She had seen that look right before the knife had gone in. Just like that her melody was back and a dreadful cold whispered through her bones.

 

She let the window back up and sighed, watching her breath dissipate once again.

 

“What in Seven Hells was that?,” Robb asked her.

 

“I needed fresh air,” she said.

 

It was a gift of hers, to lie without lying at all.

 

“Okay,” he nodded.

 

It was a habit of his, to believe her at her word.

 

“Can you remind me the exit?,” he asked her.

 

He remembered it, it was exit 17, but the silence had been getting to him too.

 

It gave him too much time to think. About the family he’d lost and what would come next. About how difficult it must be for her to sit next to him, hating himso. About how close he’d come to leaving her behind.

 

It was the last that tortured him the most.

 

It was strange in a way, that it was not the faces of his family that haunted him, but rather the one sitting next to him. It made him feel selfish, or heartless. He’d learn eventually that this was a common affliction of those who survived the plague, this preternatural fixation on those that remained.

 

The human mind is a curious thing, a powerful one too, and created for all those in that day a very clear dividing line between that which came before and that which came after.

 

For those who survived, that which came before would forever remain behind a veil, while that which came after would be in an aggressive, persistent technicolor. The real goodbye, the great one, was to the person they had been before. Some would not survive it.

 

But before or after made no difference here. The boy loved her. So it really shouldn’t have surprised him at all that this would be the part to haunt him. That every breath she drew, and the picture of her sitting right there, beautiful and vital, would serve as a reminder of how he’d almost left her behind to her fate.

 

“I think it’s exit 17, but I’ll double check,” the girl said and pulled out her phone.

 

She stared at it, and swiped this way and that. She remained silent and put her phone back in her pocket.

 

“The internet isn’t working,” she told him after a long moment.

 

He clenched his jaw and offered, “We’re in the mountains. Reception must be terrible up here.”

 

He didn’t believe that.

 

Neither did she.

 

“What do you think it will look like?,” she asked him.

 

“What do I think what will look like?,” he asked her.

 

“The new world we are going to live in.”

 

***

 

“I’m sorry,” the auburn haired girl told the black haired boy once again.

To Jon Snow, nothing Sansa Stark ever did could warrant an apology.

 

“Don’t be,” he told her easily, “Feels good to stretch.”

 

They had been driving for hours. Somehow the car her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday had not been stolen, the students of Vale University had held onto the decorum with which they’d been raised during the early hours as they fled and fell.

 

He had abandoned his motorcycle easily. It had served its purpose, bringing him to her. The drive up the mountain had been bitterly cold and he had been ready to steal one of the cars that remained so that she would not suffer it.

 

They had stopped at her request so that she might use a rest stop bathroom. After he had checked that no one was inside of it, dead or alive, he had stolen some canisters and filled them up with gasoline.

 

“Jon?,” the girl asked.

 

“Yeah, Sansa?,” he answered.

 

“You brought a lot of guns,” she stated.

 

He felt heat fill his cheeks despite the healthy crispness in the air. They had made it well down the mountain and the air had gotten thicker once again, and it was just a cool spring night once again.

 

“Where I was,” he started, weighing his words. It occurred to him that she was an innocent, that these past two days she had felt her first true pricks of pain, but that her soul remained intact. That the ways of the world, the true ways, had not yet made them to her door. “People were very scared. And fear can make people do terrible things.” He looked up at her, “And I will never let any terrible things happen to you, even if I have to commit some myself to stop it.”

 

The declaration of love hung between them like mistletoe.

 

On a different night, the girl would have blushed. She may have even fluttered her eyelashes, having been told since she was a child that men would drown in her eyes. But that day, she had seen her first dead body, and no one had picked up the phone at Winterfell.

 

“But what happens if there are too many of them?,” she asked, “What happens if we’re outnumbered?”

 

“Sansa, I’ll protect you, I _promise_ ,” he answered the question he thought she was asking.

 

“I want to protect myself,” the girl snapped and the boy flinched. Her voice was gentler when she went on, “Will you teach me?”

 

Wordlessly, the way he did so many things, he placed the last canister into her trunk and reached and pulled out a pistol and a pack of bullets. He loaded them in and closed the trunk.

 

She held her hand out for the gun and he shook his head. They were far too close to the fuel.

 

He looked around and took her into the street. They hadn’t seen another car in ages and the sound of gunfire would hopefully repel anyone on foot. He stopped them on the edge of the street, and pointed to the sign that cited the speed limit as 65.

 

“Where do you want me to hit?,” he asked her.

 

The girl appraised him and said, knowing his expert marksmanship, “The upper left corner of the five.”

 

“Stand behind me,” he told her. The girl followed his orders, “Now place your hands on my arms.”

 

The pair were the same height and so when she placed her hands on his arms, she understood the exact angle he was accomplishing. She moved closer, her hands sliding further down his arms, until her hands fell just short of his wrists.

 

Their breath intermingled in the night air, and her cheek was pressed to his.

 

“Do you feel that?,” he whispered. The girl’s mouth had gone dry and so she simply nodded against him, the softness of her cheek rubbing against the coarse hair of his beard. “This will hurt your ears,” he warned her.

 

“I’m ready,” she told him, a heaviness in her tone.

 

She was ready, to say goodbye to the perfect of the girl she had once been. She could feel it, her skin turning, and she craved it, the steel it would soon become.

 

She only hoped that he’d still love her when she was no longer the girl he’d always known.

 

The gun crackled with life as the bullet soared to her specified destination. It made an angry sound as it hit the tin, and she knew that it would not sound like that if it ever met flesh.

 

“My turn,” she soldiered on.

 

He stepped behind her and took her into the warm embrace of his arms. Their breath met once again, their other cheeks meeting, his hands covering hers.

 

“Lower this time,” he said and they moved in tandem. “To the bottom of the six.”

 

She adjusted to the new angle and kept her eyes focused where he told her. His breath on her ear and the hard planes of his body told her this was all for naught. That nothing could threaten her if he was near, and she refused to believe a world in which he was not close by.

 

She pressed her finger against the trigger and felt as much as she heard the surprising crack as the bullet hit exactly where they’d intended.

 

“There Sansa Stark. That is a straight shot to the heart.”


	8. The Balance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a short one to get me back into it, this is all Robbcella, next chapter will be all Jonsa.

 

Dawns and dusks passed without ceremony. 

 

They slept and drove, only to sleep again before driving once more. They were sick of the car and one another. Both had started to smell, though neither would tell the other so. 

 

They had made it out of the mountains, and though they had learned they could not go to Winterfell, they still drove North. Though the internet had stopped, cell phone towers still stood and worked for the time being, so they knew that the black haired boy and auburn haired girl were some fifty miles ahead searching for a safe place to meet. 

 

The golden haired girl opened the window and was pleased at least to find that it was spring once again. She placed her hand out the window, letting the wind whip through her fingers, and rested her cheek upon her slender upper arm, closing her eyes against the sunlight. 

 

The boy next to her glanced over at her and remembered her at fourteen in the same position. He had yearned to touch her then, the way one might the first hint of a flower on the bud.

 

He would not let himself admit that he yearned to touch her now. 

 

"Look!," she cried. 

 

 _I am_ he thought.

 

He followed her gaze to a stream. They had abandoned the highway, too full of cars, and had been on back roads for some time. 

 

"It's a stream," he noted uselessly.

 

"Pull over," she told him. 

 

He did as she asked, and she got out of the truck. He parked and followed her out, after grabbing the knife from glove compartment.

 

She went into the backseat and pulled out her backpack, opening it and placing sweatpants and a t shirt, a bra and underwear on the hood of the truck. She went into the bag that they had pilfered from the gas station and pulled out little bottles of shampoo and soap.

 

"You'll freeze," he told her.

 

It was only April and the stream was shaded.

 

"I'd rather that than sit in my own filth for another minute," she argued.

 

The boy had started to smell by the end of the second day. She had held on a bit longer but the past few days, particularly those when they could not open the windows due to cold or danger had left a putrid scent lingering.

 

He held his finger to his lips and took her hand in his. He was too focused on his task to notice that the girl interlaced their fingers as they walked down to the pebbled shore.

 

Silently he looked in all directions, searching for the subtlest sign of movement, danger.

 

“I’ll guard,” he told her when he was as sure as he could be that they were safe.

 

“What about you?,” she asked softly.

 

“You afraid you’ll have to get back in that truck with my stinky ol’ self?,” he asked.

 

Her melodic laughter echoed against the rushing water. It was the first time he’d heard it in years and it made goosebumps arrive on his arms and the hair upon them to rise.

 

“Yes,” she told him honestly and it was his turn to laugh.

 

They realised at the same time that their hands were still clasped and she pulled hers from his, a sensation, unlike laughter, that he remembered all too well.

 

“I’ll go afterwards,” he told her.

 

The girl undressed purposefully. The boy had seen a number of girls undress before, their eyes on his, every move designed to enthral him. To him the girl appeared wholly indifferent to his presence.

 

She had never been naked in front of him or any other boy before.

 

The water was cold as she stepped into it but she stepped forward once again. It was not quite deep enough to swim but she bent at the knees and submerged.

 

He did not hear the way she screamed underwater.

 

She moved quickly, abandoning her usual practical nature and using too much of the shampoo by washing her hair twice.

 

She went back to the shore, stepping carefully on smooth stones. She had no desire to make use of the scant medical supplies they had.

 

She placed the shampoo and soap down next to her, covering herself for the first time as she neared the boy.

 

It was a useless gesture, he would not look at her anyway.

 

“Take off your clothes,” she told him. He gulped. “I’ll wash them with mine.”

 

With one more glance around he went back to the truck and pulled out his own change of clothes. He hurried back to the shore, to the girl, and removed his t shirt.

 

She had never seen a boy undressed before and she blushed. She might have been embarrassed about that only a week before, but it pleased her now to know that parts of her remained in the afterwards.

 

He handed her his clothes and she handed him the soap and shampoo. He gave the shampoo back to her. He had seen the way she closed her eyes as she rinsed it through her golden hair.

 

In her short lifetime she had been gifted a horse and a home along the Dornish coast. A boy with particular interest in her had given her a pearl necklace, each pearl chosen specifically by him, misshapen in some way and all the more beautiful for it.

 

No gift had ever meant so much as the little bottle of generic shampoo, offered silently by the boy who had once given her his heart with just as little ceremony.

 

He waded into the water and she began to rinse their clothes, starting first with his. She rubbed them with rocks, having once seen a nanny of hers do so, and spared a bit of conditioner on each garment to rid them of the stench of overuse.

 

He cupped himself as he returned to her side, and they rung out the clothes together, letting the water dribble off of them slowly. They brushed their teeth, pleased not to have to use more of their water supply to do so, and dressed with still damp skin.

 

They grabbed their wet clothes and some rocks, and laid them in the bed of his truck, now theirs, to dry in the wind and sun.

 

She brushed out her hair and he checked their phones, and pulled out the two remaining apples from the bag. They had been saving them, sharing them, but the had become softer and brown in spots so there was no use in doing so now.

 

She got in the driver’s seat and he got in the passenger’s and they left the windows rolled down as they pulled away.

 

Twenty minutes later the rocks the girl had used to wash their clothes would be stained red after an altercation between two groups of travellers.

 

Seventy miles north, the auburn haired girl tried to rinse her shaking hands of blood in the connected river after making her first use of the lessons the black haired boy had taught her.

 

The golden haired girl and the auburn haired boy hummed along to a song they had loved as children, apple juice dripping down their hands, as though their souls had been cleaned along with their bodies.

 

The gods of the new world always found a balance.


End file.
